1857.] The Poetry of the New Testament. 213 THE POETRY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. THE main principle of the Old Testament may be comprised in the sentence,"Fear God, and keep his commandments: this is the whole duty of man." The main principle of the New is, "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved." And yet, round these two simple sentences, what masses of beauty and illustration have been collected! To enforce them, what argument, what eloquence, what poetry, have been employed! Say, rather, that those truths, from their exceeding breadth, greatness, and magnetic power, have levied a tribute from multitudinous regions, and made every form of thought and composition subservient to their influence and end. The New Testament, as well as the Old, is a poem-the Odyssey to that Iliad. And over the poetry of both, circumstances and events have exerted a modifying power. Yet it is remarkable, that in the New Testament, although events of a marvelous kind were of frequent occurence, they are not used so frequently in a poetical way as in the Old. The highest poetry in the New Testament, is either didactic in its character, as the Sermon on the Mount, and Paul's praise of charity, or it is kindled up by visions of the future, and apparitions through the present darkness of the great white throne. The resurrection, as connected with the doctrine of a general judgment, is the event which has most colored the poetry of the New Testament. The throne becomes a far more commanding object than even the mount that might be touched. Faint, in fact, is the reflection of this "Great Vision" upon the page of ancient prophecy: the trump is heard, as if from the distance; the triumph of life over death is anticipated seldom, and with little rapture. But no sooner do we reach the threshold of the new dispensation, than we meet voices from the interior of the sanctuary, proclaiming a judgment; the sign of the Son of Man is advanced above, the graves around are seen with the tombstones loosened and the turf broken, and "I shall arise" hovering in golden characters over each narrow house; the central figure bruises death under his feet and points with a cross to the distant horizon, where life and immortality are cleaving the clouds, and coming forth with beauty and healing on their wings. Such is the prospect in our Christian sanctuary; and hence the supernatural grandeur of the strains which swell within it. Hence the rapture of the challenge, "O death, where is thy sting?" Hence the solemnity of the assertion, "Marvel not at this, for the hour is coming when they that are in their graves shall hear the voice of the Son of Man." Hence the fiery splendor of the description, "The Lord himself shall descend with a shout, with the voice of the archangel and the trump of God." Hence the harping symphonies and sevenfold hallelujahs of the Apocalypse, "I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God.” Here, indeed, is a source of inspiration, open only to the New Testament writers. The heathens knew not of the resurrection of the dead. But Paul and John have extracted a poetry from the darkness of the grave. In heathen belief, there was, indeed, a judgment succeeding the death of the individual; but no general assemblage, no public trial, no judgment seat, "high and lifted up," no flaming universe, and, above all, no Godman swaying the fiery storm, and, with the hand that had been nailed to the cross, opening the books of universal and final decision. "Meditations among the Tombs," what a pregnant title to what a feeble book! Ah! the tombs are vaster and more numerous than Hervey dreamed. There is the churchyard among the mountains, where the "rude forefathers of the hamlet lie." There is the crowded cemetery of the town, where silent thousands have laid themselves down to repose. There are the wastes and wildernesses of the world, where "armies whole have sunk," and where the dead have here their shroud of sand, and there their shroud of snow. There is the hollow of the earth, where Korah, Dathan and Abiram, and many besides, have been engulfed. There are the fields of battle, which have become scenes of burial, as well as of death. And there is the great ocean, which has wrapped its garment of green round many a fair and noble head, and which rolls its continual requiem of sublimity and sadness over the millions whom it has entombed. Thus does the earth, with all its continents and oceans, roll around the sun a splendid sepulcher! Amid those dim catacombs, what victims have descended! The hero, who has coveted the dreadful distinction of entering hell, red from a thousand victories, is in the grave. The sage, who has dared to say that, if he had been consulted in the making of the universe he had made it better, is in the grave. The monarch, who has wept for more worlds to conquer and to reign over, is in the grave. The poet, who, towering above his kind, had seemed to demand a contest with superior intelligences, and sought to measure his pen against the red thunderbolts of Heaven, is in the grave. Where now the ambition of the first, the insane presumption of the second, the idle tears of the third, the idler laurels of the last? All gone, sunk, lost, drowned, in that ocean of Death, where no oar ever yet broke the perpetual silence! But, alas! these graves are not full. In reason's ear-an ear ringing ever with strange and mystic sounds-there is heard a voice from the thousand tombs, saying-"Yet there is room." The churchyard among the hills has a voice, and says-"There is room under the solitary birch which waves over me." The city cemetery hath a vioce, and says"Crowded as I am, I can yet open a corner for thy dust; yet there is room." The field of battle says-" There is room. I have earth enough to cover all my slain." The wildernesses have a voice, and say "There is room in us-room for the travelers who explore our sands or our snows-room for the caravans that carry their merchandise across our dreadful solitudes." The depth of the ocean says "Thousands have gone down within me-nay, an entire world has become the prey of my waters, still my caverns are not crowded; yet there is room." The heart of the earth has a voice-a hollow voice-and says-"What are Korah and his company to me? I am empty; yet there is room." Do not all the graves compose thus one melancholy chorus, and say "Yet there is room; room for thee, thou maiden, adorned with virtue and loveliness; room for thee, thou aged man; room for thee, thou saint, as surely as there was room for thy Saviour; room for thee, thou sinner, as surely as thy kindred before thee have laid themselves and their iniquities down in the dust; room for all, for all must in us at last lie down." 1857.] The Poetry of the New Testament. 215 But is this sad cry to resound forever? No; for we are listening for a mightier voice, which is yet to yierce the cold ear of death, and drown the dull monotony of the grave. How magnificent, even were they fictitious, but how much more, as recording a fact, the words—“ All that are in the graves shall hear his voice, and shall come forth." To what voices do the dead not listen! Music can charm the serpent, but it can not awaken the dead. The voice of an orator can rouse a nation to frenzy, but let him try his eloquence on the dead, and a hollow echo will rebuke his folly. The thunder in the heavens can appall a city, but there is one spot in it where it excites no alarm, and that spot is the tomb. "The larks shrill clarion, or the echoing horn. No more across them from their narrow bed." There is but one voice which the dead will hear. It is that voice which shall utter the words "awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust; for thy dew is as the dew of herbs, and the earth shall cast out the dead." Was it a sublime spectacle, when, at the cry, "Lazarus, come forth," the dead man appeared at the mouth of the sepulcher, the hue of returning life on his cheek, forming a strange contrast to his white graveclothes? What, then, shall be said of the coming forth of innumerable Lazaruses, of the whole cougregation of the dead-the hermit rising from his solitary grotto, the soldier from his field of blood, the sailor from his sea-sepulcher, the shepherd from his mountain-grave? To see -as in the season of spring, the winged verdure climbs the mountain, clothes the plain, flushes the forest, adorns the brink and the brow of the precipice-in this second spring, a torrent of life passing over the world, and living men coming forth, where all before had been silence, desolation, and death; to see the volcano disgorging the dead which were in him, and the earthquake relaxing his jaws, and giving back the dead which were in him, and the sullen tarn restoring her lawful captives, and the ocean unrolling and revealing the victims of her "innermost main,” and the Seine disclosing her suicidal prey, and the wastes and wildernesses becoming unretentive of their long concealed dead-every pore quickening into life, every grave becoming a womb. This is the spectacle of the Christian resurrection—a spectacle but once to be beheld, but to be remembered forever-a spectacle which every eye shall witness- a spectacle around which a universe shall gather with emotions of uncontrollable astonishment and of fearful joy. The New Testament stands and shines in the luster of this expectation. So important is the place of resurrection in the system, that Jesus identifies himself with it saying "I am the resurrection and the life." And from his empty grave floods of meaning, hope, and beauty, flow forth over the New Testament page. The Lord's day, too, forms a link connecting the rising of Christ with that of his people, and is covered with the abundance both of the first-fruits and of the full harvest. Among the incidents in the life of Christ, there are several of an intensely poetical character. We shall mention here the Transfiguration. This singular event did not take place, as commonly supposed, on Tabor. Tabor was then the seat of a Roman military fort. It took place on a high, nameless mountain, probably in Gallilee. on the Sabbath day ("After six days, Jesus took Peter, James, and It was seemingly John, up into a high mountain apart") that this grand exception to the tenor of Christ's earthly history was manifested. It was a rehearsal of his Ascension. His form, which had been bent under a load of sorrow (a bend more glorious than the bend of the rainbow,) now erected itself, like the palm-tree from pressure, and he became like unto a "pillar in the temple of his God." His brow expanded; its wrinkles of care fled, and the sweat-drops of his climbing toil were transmuted into sparks of glory. His eye flashed forth, like the sun from behind a cloud-nay, his whole frame became transparent, as it were one eye. The light which had long lain in it concealed was now unveiled in full effulgence: "His face did shine as the sun." His very raiment was caught in a shower of radiance, and became white as no fuller on earth could whiten it; and who shall describe the luster of his streaming hair, or the eloquent silence of that smile which sate, like the love of God, upon his lips? "What hill is like to Tabor hill, in beauty and in fame, For there, in sad days of his flesh, o'er Christ a glory came, And light o'orowed him like a sea, and raised his shining brow, And the yo. came forth, which bade all worlds the son of God avow?" ་ This radiance passed away. The glory of the transfigured Jesus faded as the red cloud fades in the west, when the sun has set. (And how could the disciples bear the change? And yet, as Christ, in his coronation robes, had seemed, perhaps, distant and strange to them, did not his returning self appear dearer, if less splendid, than his glorified humanity?) But the glory did not pass without leaving a mild reflex upon the page of Scripture. "We were with him in the holy mount," says Peter; and was not the transfigured Christ in his eyes when he speaks immediately after of "The day-star arising in our hearts?" And John's picture of Christ in the Apocalypse, is a colossal copy of the figure he had seen on the holy mount, vibrating between dust and Deity, at once warm as humanity, and glorious as God. As producing or controlling the poetry of the New Testament, next to the resurrection, stands the incarnation. "Will God in very deed dwell with men upon the earth?" Will God, above all, dwell in a form of human flesh, and so dwell, that we must say of it, "God is here,” nay, "this is God?" Is there found a point where the finite and the infinite meet, mingle without confusion, marry without compulsion, and is this point the Man of Galilee? In fact, the incarnation and poetry bear a resemblance. Poetry is truth dwelling in beauty. The incarnation is the Word "made" holy and beauteous "flesh.” Poetry is the everlasting descent of the Jupiter of the True into the arms of the Danae of the beautiful, in a shower of Gold The incarnation is God the Spirit, descending on Jesus the perfect man, like a dove, and abiding upon and within him. The difference is, that while the truth of Jesus is entirely moral, that of poetry is more varied; and that while the one incarnation is personal and real, the other is hypothetical and ideal. Man and God have rhymed together; and the glorious couplet is, "the mystery of godliness, God manifest in the flesh." From this fact have sprung the matchless antitheses and climaxes of Paul's prose poetry, Peter's fervid meditations on the glory of Christ, 1857.] Grandpapa and his Grandchildren. 217 and John's pantings of love toward the "Man God," on whose bosom he had leaned, and whose breath had made him forever warm. But without dwelling on other circumstances modifying New Testament poetry, we pass to speak, in the next chapter, of the Poetry of the Gospels, and of that transcendent poet who died on Calvary. GRANDPAPA AND IS GRANDCHILDREN. WRITTEN FOR A FAMILY MEETING. We are coming! we are coming! Here are Henrys, by the dozen; All are coming-what a squeeze! THE following little ballad has been much admired for its simple beauty. It is a translation from the Sclavonian language: THE DEAD LOVE. "WHITE art thou, my maiden, "But when dead, my maiden, And, poor lad, I love her Warmer than before." |